Meetings are boon and bane in the church. How you lead a meeting, and how you train your chairpeople to lead meetings, can make the difference between success and failure.

• Better meetings are more productive.
• Better meetings are a way to care for and keep your volunteers.
• Better meetings leave time for you to do other important things.

Proudfoot Consulting, an Atlanta management consulting firm, recently completed a study of meetings at 235 companies.  They found that fewer than 41% of the meetings at those companies had an appropriate agenda set. Only 38% clearly followed the agenda. And only 13% had a follow-up action play that was reviewed before the meeting concluded.

Right there you can see their key components to a successful meeting:

1) A clear agenda that is followed.
2) A reiteration at the end of the meeting of who’s to do what.

Seems pretty obvious! But funny how the obvious is so often neglected …until it is made obvious.

Elaborating on these points, the study notes that one of the problems with meeting agendas is that people don’t read the agenda ahead of time, and thus, aren’t prepared for the meeting. How many church meetings have you been to where you received the agenda when you walked in the door?  Those meetings tend to wander. And sometimes bad decisions are made, or minority voices are not heard, because members don’t have enough time to think things through.

Meetings need to have goals instead of just “reports.” How many of us have sat through committee and council meetings listening to someone take 15 minutes to describe what you could have read in 2!  Reports should be the prelude to something more.  Some simple rules & practices could elevate not only the meetings themselves, but value those who attend them and the ministry that comes out of them.

For example, Rule #1: Everyone making a report is be required to put it in writing and get it out to the attenders ahead of time. (And if you don’t, your report goes to the end of the agenda.)

Rule #2: Every report must summarize AND evaluate past events and projects which the committee was responsible for. As part of this evaluation, the report must INCLUDE QUESTIONS, such as, “The Mission Committee Fair was held last month. How would you rate the event? And how do you think we can improve it for next time?“  If you ask this question without giving leaders time to think about it, you won’t get quality feedback.

Rule #3: Every report must include notes about future events and projects, and include a list of questions and needs. For example, “Should the Mission Fair be held next Winter or is there a better time?”  And how can we make the displays more interesting?”

The author of “Meeting Excellence: 33 Tools to Lead Meetings that Get Results,” advises the person leading the meeting -to open it up by stating the key outcome the group needs to address, sticking to the agenda, and then summarizing the action plan before the meeting wraps up.

One of the best committees I was ever part of was the Tech Committee at a former church. We used email and a message board at the church’s website to craft our upcoming agendas together. We suggested ideas for future agendas and kept them in a special thread on the message board so as not to be forgotten. WE moved our meeting dates around to fit individual schedules and our upcoming agendas. It wasn’t hard, -we just set up a “poll” on the message board and asked members of the committee to vote on which dates they were available. (We dumped the idea of ”meeting once a month whether we had something to talk about or not.” Thus, there were months where we met twice, and months where we didn’t meet at all.)

We posted our ‘reports’ on the message board ahead of the meetintg, so that members of the committee could read them. One of the nice features of most message board software is that you can “request an email alert” to new content. Thus, when I posted a ‘report’ about what the security door salesman had to say, all the members of the committee were automatically notified by email that my report was online. The email even came with a direct link to my report. And we didn’t have to waste valuable meeting time rehashing it.

At the end of every meeting, our able chair summarized “who was doing what” and he posted the minutes/action plan on the message board FROM the meeting, so that everyone could access it when they got home. To remind us, an email alert to check the msg board was waiting in our email inboxes when we got home. And we used email and the message board to discuss ideas “in-between” meetings. These strategies made our meeting well-attended and very productive.

Theory to practice…..

One of the problems we have in the church is that we put people in positions of leadership who have no meeting or management skills.  Clearly then, we need to do OFFICER TRAINING with our members. Yet in most churches, that’s only a dream.

Compounding this problem is the fact that most staff members have no training in this area either! Providentially, there are some good books on meetings (start with the one mentioned in this post or go to your library), and there are likely some TRAINED MANAGERS sitting in your pews or in your community. Tap them. Require your staff to get meeting leadership training, with the hope that it will set an example for other leaders.

I know, I know, -it sounds like “one more thing to do.”  But consider the overall impact of training your staff and volunteers. It would make your meetings more productive and fulfilling. It would make leaders and volunteers feel more valuable, and allow them to better contribute. –And it would make it easier to RECRUIT VOLUNTEERS, because they know that meetings will be well-led and productive, rather than frustrate them and waste their time.

We also need to take a look at the way we COMMUNICATE information about the meetings to our volunteers. Look above again at my description of how our Tech Committee operated. Here in the 21st Century, there’s no excuse for planning meetings that people can’t attend, aren’t prepared ahead of time for, and had no say in what the agenda was going to be.

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Make sure you read my post on “Moving Meetings into Homes.”

Creating a more personal and comfortable setting AND having an effective meeting are NOT mutually exclusive goals! And if you are the staff person, meeting in member homes, as opposed to the church, will give you opportunities to minister to the member and their family -IF you take the time to do it.

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